Mimicking Java's inheritance behavior exactly is difficult in Perl without adding a bunch of overhead that the Java compilers normally handle; namely, inserting calls to super() in cases where your subclass constructor does not explicitly call the superclass constructor, and also generating zero-argument constructors to be used by subclasses of your subclass. In Java, every time you create an object you instantiate the class's ancestors all the way up to java.lang.Object, and in order to facilitate this there must be generic, default constructors available. Update/Correction: The compiler will insert a constructor for you in the total absence of a constructor. If you've already got one that takes arguments, it's up to you to provide a zero-arg version unless you wish to force subclasses to specify arguments at all times.